Body parts / parts of bodies: Outlines
of almost life-size figures are embroidered onto canvas raw or white, sometimes
dissolving into an abstract tangle of lines. As in a palimpsest, paint is
applied over this surface, implying a certain degree of body modeling and
allowing the figures to meld into color spaces or emerge from them. The
palette, which makes use of bright neon colors while at the same time remaining
limited to the primary colors and their variations, underlines the expressive
rhythm of the embroidery and the painting, whereby it also relates to a graffiti
aesthetic: an approach to painting that is flashy and full of contrasts. A game
of contradictions and paradoxes begins: the contemplative mode of embroidery,
in earlier times associated with the so-called housewife, collides with the
aesthetic of accelerated activity characterizing the participants of the
sprayer scene at work. "Sgriaffare": scratching at the vulnerable
skin of things, tattooing the organless body, writing on the contingent
territories of the unsayable. And then in an act of expansion and inversion:
pressing beyond the picture's edges, bursting out of the formats,
liquidation/liquification of the object character. The same figures - now
mirrored, rotated, doubled - are painted gesturally on the wall in neon colors,
while a fragmentary figure is sewn directly onto the wall in black thread. A
painting ground is repeated in another color.

The exhibition sails under the banner
of an "as if". As if it were possible that a norm-transcending power
were inherent in embroidery. As if graffiti, applied anonymously under the
sheltering curtain of night could be domesticated by bringing it indoors. As if
the ornamental and the abstract, in a morganatic marriage, could establish a
visual space transforming the tyranny of intimacy into a gesture of liberation,
and the delinquency of sprayer art could, through
contextual displacement, produce an alternative form of social
interaction.

Fulterer / Scherrer's rampantly growing
images, which literally break through their frame, are experimental setups in a
visual laboratory, whose purpose, beyond the creation of an injured beauty, is
to offer proposals for opening the borders of production techniques. As if the
aesthetic concretization of a gesture could at the same time open up the
possibility of endless remixes. The magic of the banal, the banality of
unconciliatory inscription on the periphery of social norms.

In the words of a well-known pop song:

"You’ve got to pick up every
stitch,

must be the Season of the Witch."

(Thomas
Miessgang, 2013)

GABRIELE
FULTERER,born
in Mürzzuschlag in 1967, lives and works in Vienna.
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Bruno Gironcoli), Mozarteum University Salzburg
(Sculpture), University of Salzburg (German Language and Literature).

CHRISTINE
SCHERRER,born
in Salzburg in 1967, lives and works in Vienna.
University of Applied Arts Vienna (Ingeborg Strobl / Erwin Wurm), Mozarteum
University Salzburg (Textile Arts / Tapestry), University of Salzburg
(History).